The Secret Gift (3 page)

Matilde had told Libby that she’d never known her husband’s parents, as he’d been rather older than she was and his parents had died before they’d met and gotten married. When Libby had questioned Matilde about her own parents, she had simply given their names—Hugh and Catherine. There weren’t, she’d said, any pictures for her to paste on her tree.

But there was a photograph.

This
photograph.

The man pictured in the photograph was someone from her mother’s life in Scotland, someone whose memory she had kept all these many years. Whoever he was, he had to have meant something to Matilde, something very special. Perhaps he was still alive, still living in Scotland. If so, he would want to know that Matilde has passed away. Perhaps he could even tell Libby something more about this mysterious stone her mother had left to her. But without a name, how could she possibly track him down?

All she had was the name of a village.

That was, at the very least, a starting point.

Dusk had fallen by the time British Airways 7946 touched down at Inverness’s Dalcross Airport. The sky was leaden, a curtain of clouds blotting out the ebbing daylight and a fine, spitting mist sheened the plane’s window, casting Libby’s first sight of her mother’s homeland in a dim haze.

As they taxied to the terminal, the pilot’s voice came over the loudspeaker, announcing that it was a “brisk seven degrees Celsius.” Libby didn’t know whether that meant it was cold or not, but as everyone else seemed to be donning their overcoats, she did the same.

She’d taken the 8:20 p.m. flight from Boston the night before, with what should have been a brief stopover in London that morning. But she’d extended the stopover, opting to remain in London for the day, taking a connection on to Scotland later that afternoon.

It was the first time Libby had been to the United Kingdom, and London was too much of a temptation to simply pass through. All the way from Paddington Station, she’d had her face pressed to the window of the black cab as they rolled past the golden gates of Buckingham Palace and inched their way through the swirl of traffic at Piccadilly Circus with the tall tower of Big Ben standing sentry in the distance.

Any other time, she would have stopped to watch the Changing of the Guard, or have a stroll along the banks of the sleepy River Thames. But Libby had only six hours before she had to make her connecting flight, and London to an antiquarian bookseller was quite a bit like the Saks Fifth Avenue annual sale to a compulsive shopper. There were more bookshops, book fairs, and auctions on tap than in any other city in the world. And there was one street in the center of London on which a good many of them could be found.

Charing Cross Road ran from St. Giles Circus all the way to Trafalgar Square, and Libby spent the day peeking in its shop windows and browsing through its book-crammed stalls. She even passed by the famed number 84, which was, she was saddened to discover, now a Pizza Hut and no longer the quintessential shop immortalized in print by author Helene Hanff. She met colleagues she’d only ever spoken to on the phone or by e-mail, and even treated herself to a purchase or two for her own modest collection. She passed hours digging through shelves, perched on ladders, and sitting cross-legged on the floor, losing herself in the imaginary lives she discovered hidden away between the weathered cover boards.

It wasn’t just the stories, but the books themselves, the texture of the thick vellum pages, the earthy scent of the seasoned bindings. Libby read inscriptions written decades, even a century, earlier and daydreamed about the people who had composed them.

To Dorothea, Remembering Paris ... With all my love, Spencer.

Aunt Freda, With love from Ros—Christmas 1927.

William Seton, Esq.—135 West Regent Street, Glasgow, 1862

If she took a moment, Libby could just imagine Ros and Aunt Freda, sitting with their family and basking in the warmth of a Yule log while that very book lay wrapped and waiting for Christmas morning. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, she mused, to travel to Glasgow, to seek out 135 West Regent Street, and to see if perhaps a descendant of William Seton, Esq., could still be living there? And what of Dorothea and Spencer? They could today be an elderly couple, married some sixty-plus years, with a glimmer in their eyes whenever they remembered their time in Paris.

It was the sort of thing that usually had her purchasing the book for herself. It was almost as much a pleasure for Libby to imagine their lives as it was to read the lives of the characters contained inside the books. She didn’t care if it was a cookbook or a treatise on vegetable gardening. She’d even once spent nearly half her monthly paycheck for an eighteenth-century Voltaire written completely in Russian, simply because the inscription had read “For Catherine, Empress of my Heart ... Gregory.” Libby never could quite convince herself that the book hadn’t once been a gift to the Russian czarina from her favorite lover.

All too soon the hour for her connecting flight approached, and Libby found herself leaving London aboard the express train bound for Gatwick Airport, her suitcase comparatively heavier than it had been upon arriving.

The airport at Inverness was small, plopped in the middle of what appeared to be little more than a farmer’s field, with huge rolls of shorn hay lined up along one end. Libby followed the other passengers as they disembarked directly onto the tarmac, claiming her bag on her way inside the terminal. She’d already gone through customs in London, so within an hour of landing, she was tucked inside a rented, semicompact Vauxhall Astra and was rolling west along the A96. She knew this because as soon as she had turned onto the roadway, a computerized voice barked at her from inside the dashboard.

“You—are—on—the—A96—traffic—flowing—freely.”

It had scared her half to death. In America, cars didn’t typically talk.

She found a button just above the radio and just below the small speaker from which, it had seemed, the voice had bellowed. The button bore a question mark with the letters
NAV
. She pressed it.

“You—are—on—the—A96—traffic—flowing—freely.”

She pressed it again.

“You—are—on—the—A96—traffic—flowing—freely.”

The motorway (not, she’d been informed by the rental car agent, the
highway
) bypassed the city of Inverness, taking her over a stretch of bridge that crossed the Moray Firth. Even at dusk it was a lovely sight, the waters sluggish and everything limned in a hazy aura of light. As soon as she reached the opposite side of the bridge, the navigational voice inside the dashboard barked again.

“You—are—on—the—A9—traffic—flowing—freely.”

Safe in the knowledge that she had taken the correct route off the roundabout, Libby eased back in the driver’s seat, trying to accustom herself to driving on the left side of the road. Behind her, the lights of Inverness glimmered in the mist.

At first, Scotland appeared rather like her New England home, with miles of drystone walls that ran along the roadside, laundry hanging from wind-lashed lines, and boats bobbing in lonely shadowed harbors. It was greener, perhaps, with far fewer trees, and hills that rolled and stretched into the horizon. Instead of steeply pitched Cape-style houses, there were stone cottages with dormer windows and pristine whitewashed walls. The road, too, seemed to grow narrower the further she drove, winding and twisting past a succession of different villages with charming names like Dingwall or Strathpfeffer or even Dornoch (pronounced “door-knock” by the rental car agent).

It wasn’t until the map led her onto the A836 that Libby began to realize just how different Scotland could be.

Her first clue was the
SINGLE-TRACK ROAD
sign, which she’d barely had time to glimpse before a pair of headlights came tearing straight at her. A flash of panic had her swerving for the side of the road to avoid the oncoming car, but, not quite accustomed to driving on the left, she headed for the right and nearly collided with the other vehicle head-on.

She skidded to a stop, trying to calm her panicked heartbeat while praying that another car didn’t approach. She glared at the dashboard and that button with the question mark.

“You could’ve warned me,” she muttered, then tore through her carry-on bag for the travel guide she had picked up the day before leaving. She vaguely remembered having seen something in it about driving when she’d flipped through the pages during her flight.

Yes. There is was. Page 214. “Survival Guide; Practical Information.”

Whilst driving through Scotland, you may chance to encounter what is referred to as a “single-track road,” particularly in the Highlands region. Single-track roads should be treated as you would a double-track, or divided road. First thing to remember is to be certain to stay to the left side of the road! Avoid pulling into passing places on the right-hand side when passing oncoming vehicles.

Oh, well. Rule #1 broken. Libby read on.

On a single-track road you will find small laybys (areas to pull over) that you can use to let another car to pass if you should meet. Remember that whoever is nearer to the passing place has to reach it in order to allow the oncoming vehicle to pass. The Scottish are generally a friendly sort and will usually greet the other driver when encountering a vehicle on these roads.

Libby rather doubted that the other driver’s “hand signal” had been his idea of a friendly greeting.

After a quick study of the road signage illustrated at the bottom of the page, she decided to give it another go. She certainly couldn’t sit there all night. She edged the car back onto the roadway, knuckles tight on the steering wheel, and watched the path before her as if at any moment an eighteen-wheeler might appear, heading straight for her.

Blessedly, none did, and as the miles began to pass without another car in sight, Libby’s confidence slowly returned. She even started to relax and picked up a little speed.

The first mileage sign came into the light of her headlights moments later.

WRATH VILLAGE—67 MILES

That wasn’t so bad. If the road stayed clear, she would be there in an hour, hour and a half tops.

Libby had never seen dark
this
dark before.

It had been well over two hours since she’d seen that first mileage sign, and she was now beginning to panic. She had no clue where she was, or if she was still in Scotland, for that matter. The saner side of her knew she must be. After all, she was on an island, and she hadn’t driven into the ocean yet, but the last mileage sign she’d seen had read
WRATH VILLAGE—18 MILES
, and that had seemed like at least an hour before. She’d been punching the little
NAV
button over and over, but had received only a sort of empty hum in response. Apparently even the car didn’t know where they were. She supposed, however, that the empty hum was decidedly better than being told “You—are—in—the—middle—of—nowhere—traffic—flowing—freely.”

The driving was torturous. The narrow road wound and wandered its way through steep hills and along straggling loch lines so close to the water’s edge that she daren’t blink for fear of driving straight over.

“You—are—at—the—bottom—of—the—loch—traffic—flowing—freely.”

Along one particularly grueling stretch, she’d had to come to a tire-screeching halt when an indistinct figure had suddenly emerged into the glow of her headlights.

It turned out to be a sheep that had had no intention, it appeared, of moving. It merely stood, staring back at her while chewing its midnight snack, leaving her little choice but to edge the car around it.

There were no streetlights, no traffic lights, no lights of any kind, only the occasional lamp glow that she could just make out coming from some remote cottage window. Even the moon seemed to have gone into seclusion.

At one point, some distance back, she’d passed a red phone box and for the next several miles had seriously considered backtracking to it, to call someone—anyone—to come and rescue her. She would have, except that she had no earthly idea how she would ever tell them where to find her.

And she’d never been so tired in her life.

The fatigue of the past days and the stress of the past weeks had been steadily winning the fight to overtake her. She could sense herself starting to slip in her efforts to fend it off and had even felt her eyes begin to close as she drove. She had opened the car windows to the bitter chill of the outside air and blared the only station she could get on the car radio, a static mixture of Celtic folk and accordion-ridden country dancing music.

She hadn’t slept a wink during the flight from Boston, had been restless the entire flight, out of balance, with no clue what she was going to find on the other end of her journey.

Had her mother felt the same when she’d made her trip all those years before? Had she been excited? Frightened? Matilde had come to Boston, she’d told Libby, to marry Charles Hutchinson, an American who had apparently swept her off her feet, for she’d had Libby almost immediately after. What a rare thing their love for one another must have been, to have brought her mother so far from everything she had ever known. Matilde had always told Libby she didn’t regret having gone to America, and she’d never once returned to Scotland, not even to visit. In fact, throughout her childhood, Libby could remember no letters, no phone calls ever having come from that corner of the world.

Then why? Why the peculiar crystal stone and the photograph of a man Matilde had never mentioned? And why would her mother have waited until after she was gone to reveal it to Libby?

There was an answer, Libby knew it. And there was only one way—and one place—to find it.

Wrath Village.

If she ever got there.

Just a few more miles, she told herself. She punched the gas as she started to climb a steep rise. Surely she had to be almost there.